Booth Report: General Imaging Co.

Las Vegas Convention Center

Last year, General Imaging Co. made its debut as a provider of GE-branded digital imaging products, launching with no less than eight digital cameras and one printer. The models were fairly stylish and on paper the feature-set seemed promising, but early indications were that not enough attention had been paid to image quality. A year later, and GE has launched nine new cameras (of which eight were on display at the company's PMA booth) with all the latest buzzword features including smile / blink detection, plus LCD displays that automatically sense and adjust for ambient lighting conditions. At the top end, there's even compatibility with an optional GPS accessory, as well as HD movie recording and HDTV connectivity. Let's just hope that the image quality has seen improvements this time around...

General Imaging's A735 is a very minor update to the company's A730 model. Changes include the addition of some 2008 features such as smile and blink detection, a slight increase in built-in memory from 26 to 32MB, a very slight reduction in size, and a switch from MPEG-4 to Motion JPEG compression on movies.